Memorial Day is about remembering the men and women who have died in military service, but war creates other voids. One of the worst may be the experience of returning from war: being here but there, seen but not understood, the same but changed. In diverse ways, the six recent books below do an incredible job of illuminating what it means to serve and return, to carry the weight of lost friends, and bear the burden of being left to remember.

Rightly the most celebrated in the recent wave of war literature, the National Book Award-winning Redeployment is a short story collection that manages to vividly depict an astonishing array of experiences...

Describe your latest book.
My latest book is Snow and Rose, an illustrated fairy tale retelling. I am an insatiable reader and collector of fairy tales, and my story is built on the bones of my all-time favorite Grimm’s story, "Snow-White and Rose-Red." It is a story reckoning with loss, the tale of an enchanted wood, of two brave girls and a boy named Ivo, of a wounded bear, and of what it means to know and to believe.

The book is written for middle grade readers, but I hope (as I think everyone does) that it’s really for anybody, if it’s the right story at the right time.

My debut book is a collection of personal stories and advice about communication on the Internet. More specifically, the downfall of communication because of the Internet. The thought of representing that through audio was... daunting to say the least. I mean, who wants to listen to a playlist inspired by their aunt’s endless collection of “libtard” Facebook memes and Twitter arguments with cartoon frogs about gun control? Instead, I opted to pull songs inspired by the other part of my story — the story of how, though a series of mistakes, surprises, and humbling moments, the Internet helped me find my voice and create an incredible career I never knew existed...

Describe your latest book.Tip of the Iceberg is a hybrid of travel and history, in which I follow the route of the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska. You may remember a few years ago President Obama went to Alaska and there was a surge of stories about how powerfully Alaska was already being affected by the climate Armageddon that half the country likes to pretend isn’t coming: glaciers melting, roads bucking from thawing permafrost, and native villages eroding into the sea. I saw a parallel to the Harriman Expedition, on which American conservation legends such as John Muir and George Bird Grinnell went off to Alaska for the summer on a railroad tycoon’s dime, expecting to enjoy an Alaska boondoggle. Instead, they discovered that the territory was facing ecological disaster much like it is today...

My favorite mornings are the ones where we walk to the backyard woods, where two enormous white pine trees reach to the sky. I tell my girls, “These aren’t ‘our’ woods. We are simply here to care for them for the time being.” We gather the fallen green needles from the ground, put them into our baskets, and come back inside to an almost-boiling pot of water. We chop, steep, and stir in raw honey. Of course, they always want to mix the tea themselves and it gets all over the counter, but it feels so empowering at age two to mix your own tea, doesn’t it? We carry our mugs over, gently take out our carpet squares, tattered and somewhat torn, and lay them in a circle...

Brothers of the Gun offers a ground-level reflection on the Syrian Revolution — and how it bled into international catastrophe and global war. This is a story of pragmatism and idealism, impossible violence and repression, and, even in the midst of war, profound acts of courage, creativity, and hope.

The book was born of a Twitter collaboration that began when Marwan was in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, and was written over two years, in Aleppo, Istanbul, Ankara, Mosul, and New York. While we wrote it, we were both giving each other a sort of literary education...

I write in bed, which I felt weird about for years until I learned that both Nabokov and Capote wrote in bed. Now I’m okay with it. What I feel weird about lately is that I do most of my writing on my phone, which wouldn’t be weird at all if I was a teenager. (I’m 47.) Perhaps because of my age and the fact that I didn’t grow up texting, I type with one finger. It’s slow going, obviously, but I haven’t figured out how to incorporate my thumbs or any of my other fingers.

Other than bed, bus stops have also been good writing spots for me, but I always feel strange lying down at bus stops unless I’m on drugs...

He was standing behind me, apparently, the dead man. A tall fella with a seafaring background. Merchant Navy. In life, he enjoyed gardening and had a love of roast lamb. Baxter: his name. Or Baker. Or Biggs.
Can anyone understand this?

I waited for the woman to the right of me to snap him up, like she’d claimed all the dead that evening. She sitting forward in her chair, coiled like a track-suited snake. I could see she was ready to throw her hand up in the air. She had a set to her jaw and a mean, resolute mouth.

This gentleman hailed from the south and was good with mechanical things.
Can anyone understand this?

The psychic was looking straight at me. She had the air of an auctioneer...

Describe your latest book.The Judge Hunter is set in the year 1664, which the alert reader will recognize as an important year here on the American continent. Samuel Pepys, England’s great diarist, arranges to rid himself of his annoying and needy brother-in-law, Balthasar de St. Michel (called “Balty”), by contriving a Crown commission to send him to New England to hunt down two of the fugitive judges who signed the death warrant for Charles I. What neither Pepys nor Balty realize is that Balty’s mission is a cover for a much more significant and dangerous one — that comes from the very top (as they say in movies). In Boston, Balty meets up with a shadowy, tough-guy Crown agent named Huncks. Along the way, they save a beautiful Quaker damsel...

Describe your latest book.The Island Dwellers is a collection of interlinked stories, set half in the US and half in Japan. It’s a book about nomads, travelers, people caught between the known and the deeply unfamiliar — in their relationships, their geographies, and their identities.

I wrote some of the stories while I was living in Japan, and some after I’d returned to the US and was in a limbo state, sleeping on friends’ couches and reassembling a life here. When you live in a different country, you meet a lot of people who radiate the palpable fact of running from something. You, yourself, begin to radiate that fact.